Matador

Set My Heart On Fire Immediately is the fifth studio album from Perfume Genius on Matador Records. It sees artist and musician Mike Hadreas re-teaming with Grammy-nominated producer Blake Mills and features contributions from musicians Jim Keltner, Pino Palladino and Matt Chamberlin. It was recorded in Los Angeles, where Perfume Genius settled in 2017 with longtime partner and musical collaborator Alan Wyffels.

The album explores and subverts concepts of masculinity and traditional roles, and introduces decidedly American musical influences. Throughout Hadreas plays with themes of love, sex, memory and the body, channeling popular music mythologies while irreverently authoring its own – from the delirious, Cyndi Lauper-nodding celebratory pop of On The Floor, specters of Elvis on haunted tremolo waltz One More Try, to the harpsichord- punctuated baroque pop of Jason, and gliding steel guitar and Balearic rhythm of Without You.

Making A Door Les Open, the new album from Car Seat Headrest and the first set of brand new songs since 2016’s Teens Of Denial. Created over the course of four years, it is the result of a fruitful collaboration between Car Seat Headrest, led by Will Toledo, and 1 Trait Danger, a CSH electronic side project consisting of drummer Andrew Katz and Toledo’s alternative persona “Trait”.

In this way, Making A Door Less Open sees Toledo embarking on new and imaginative roads to songwriting and recording, placing emphasis on the individual songs, each with its own special energy, rather than attempting to draw a coherent storyteller narrative through the album as he has in the past, resulting in his most dynamic and open-ended work to date.

Making A Door Less Open, the new album from Car Seat Headrest and the first set of brand-new songs since 2016’s Teens Of Denial, is set for release on May 1. The album will be available on vinyl and CD featuring distinct tracklists and mixes for each product.

Created over the course of four years, Making a Door Less Open is the result of a fruitful “collaboration” between Car Seat Headrest, led by Will Toledo, and 1 Trait Danger, a CSH electronic side project consisting of drummer Andrew Katz and Toledo’s alternative persona, “Trait.”

In this way, Making A Door Less Open sees Toledo embarking on new and imaginative roads to songwriting and recording, placing emphasis on the individual songs, each with its own “special energy,” rather than attempting to draw a coherent storyteller narrative through the album as he has in the past , resulting in his most dynamic and open-ended work to date.

Comprised of Will Toledo, Andrew Katz (drums), Ethan Ives (guitar) and Seth Dalby (bass), Car Seat Headrest has either released 11 or three albums to date, depending on the way you look at it. A prolific songwriter, Toledo took his moniker from making early recordings in the private environment of his family’s car, releasing a dozen self-recorded and produced albums on Bandcamp and building a tight-knit following. Toledo has since gone from an empty five-seater to selling out tours and filling festival main stages. 2015’s Teens of Style was a collection of songs from his early years. The band’s proper Matador debut, Teens of Denial, followed in 2016 and catapulted them to overnight commercial success and widespread critical acclaim, as well as highlighting Toledo as a prodigious lyricist. 2018’s Twin Fantasy, an epic re-imagination of an album originally released in 2011, demonstrated newfound scale, depth and ambition.

Traditional Techniques, Malkmus’ third solo LP without the Jicks (or Pavement), is new phase folk music for new phase folks, with Malkmus as attuned as ever to the rhythms of the ever-evolving lingual slipstream. It’s packed with handmade arrangements, modern folklore, and 10 songs written and performed in his singular voice. An adventurous new album in an instantly familiar mode, Traditional Techniques creates a serendipitous trilogy with the loose fuzz of the Jicks’ Sparkle Hard (2018) and the solo bedroom experiments of Groove Denied (2019).

Algiers return in 2020 with third album There Is No Year, on Matador Records. There is No Year solidifies and expands upon the doom-laden soul of their foundation, toward an even more epic, genre-reformatting sound, one somehow suspended in the amber of “a different era,” as described by guitarist Lee Tesche.
Under the direction of producers Randall Dunn [Sunn O))), Earth] and Ben Greenberg [Zs, Uniform Hubble), There Is No Year encompasses future-minded post-punk R&B from the trapped heart of ATL, where they began; to industrial soundscapes à la 4AD-era Scott Walker or Iggy and Bowie’s Berlin period; to something like the synthetic son of Marvin Gaye and Fever Ray.

Recorded in here-and-there studio spurts over the last two years, 2019 is made up of originals and cover songs tied to specific holidays, each of which has dropped / will drop around their respective date: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day (and Taurus season!), Independence Day, Springsteen’s Birthday (not an official holiday, though we’re told Chris Christie often took that day off), Halloween, Christmas, and New Year.
Dacus uses her gift as a songwriter to help understand and cope with the world around her, including making sense of national holidays, often more geared towards social media boasts and manufactured consumerism than authentic celebration. “What is going on,” she asks herself on these days, retreating from the heightened expectations of holidays to figure out what to make of them and to find her own meaning. “I’ve collected some songs from trying to answer that question,” she says, and “this EP seems like the right place to put them next to each other. These songs are self-contained, not indicative of a new direction, just a willingness to do something different and sometimes even out of character.”

Josh Homme is back with new old buddies. In 1997, Josh Homme withdrew to the desert of Joshua Tree, CA, to escape the distractions and amenities of everyday life.
What began as a relaxed writing and recording session with friends has now become a legendary project: the longest mix tape in the world! In two decades, 12 Desert Sessions have been created, showing some music icons coming out of their comfort zones to create some of the most exciting songs of their career. After almost sixteen years since the release of the last part, Desert Sessions will finally be continued in October with two breathtaking new chapters. Vol. 11 & 12 is waiting with collaborations of Billy Gibbons (ZZ Top), Les Claypool (Primus), Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint), Jake Shears (Scissor Sisters), Mike Kerr (Royal Blood), Carla Azar (Autolux), Jack White, Matt Sweeney (Chavez), David Catching (co-founder of Rancho De La Luna), comedian Matt Berry (What We Do In The Shadows), Töornst Hülpft and newcomer Libby Grace.

With a career spanning nearly four decades, Kim Gordon is one of the most prolific and visionary artists working today. A co-founder of the legendary Sonic Youth, Gordon has performed all over the world, collaborating with many of music’s most exciting figures including Tony Conrad, Ikue Mori, Julie Cafritz and Stephen Malkmus. Most recently, Gordon has been hitting the road with Body/Head, her spellbinding partnership with artist and musician Bill Nace. Despite the exhaustive nature of her résumé, the most reliable aspect of Gordon’s music may be its resistance to formula. Songs discover themselves as they unspool, each one performing a test of the medium’s possibilities and limits. Her command is astonishing, but Gordon’s artistic curiosity remains the guiding force behind her music.
It makes sense that this “American idea” (as Gordon says on the agitated rock track Air BnB) of purchasing utopia permeates the record, as no place is this phenomenon more apparent than Los Angeles, where Gordon was born and recently returned to after several lifetimes on the east coast. It was a move precipitated by a number of seismic shifts in her personal life and undoubtedly plays a role in No Home Record’s fascination with transience. The album opens with the restless Sketch Artist, where Gordon sings about “dreaming in a tent” as the music shutters and skips like scenery through a car window. Even Earthquake, perhaps the record’s most straightforward track embodies this mood; Gordon’s voice wavering like watercolor: “If I could cry and shake for you / I’d lay awake for you / I got sand in my heart for you,” guitar strokes blending into one another as they bleed out across an unstable page. Front to back, No Home Record is an expert operation in the uncanny. You don’t simply listen to Gordon’s music; you experience it.

Available in its first pressing for Matador Records, Snail Mail’s debut EP Habit serves as a nascent example of Lindsey Jordan’s extraordinary talent as a songwriter, singer and guitarist. The seven song disc features the six original 2016 tracks as well as The 2nd Most Beautiful Girl In The World, penned by K Records band Courtney Love and recorded by Snail Mail in 2018, available on record for the first time. The EP features a full-colour cover as it had originally been designed, and has been remastered by Dave Cooley at Elysian Masters.

Days of the Bagnold Summer began life as a 2012 award-winning graphic novel by Joff Winterhart, was turned into a feature film and the directorial debut of Simon Bird (The Inbetweeners, Friday Night Dinner), and is now a wonderful, rich, bittersweet, and warmly welcoming original soundtrack album by Belle and Sebastian, on Matador Records.
The album features eleven brand new Belle and Sebastian songs, as well as re-recorded versions of classics Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying, originally appearing on 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister, and I Know Where The Summer Goes, from 1998’s This Is Just a Modern Rock Song EP.

Back in print for the first time in over 10 years, Guided By Voices’ limited red vinyl reissue of Half Smiles of the Decomposed is available today.

“At the time of it’s 2004 release, ‘Half Smiles Of The Decomposed’ was meant to be Guided By Voices’ final album. As it turns out, Bob Pollard’s a better revisionist historian than the rest of us combined — it merely turned out to be the pause button being pressed on that particular incarnation of GBV, though given Doug Gillard’s contribution, one could argue this one sits pretty neatly alongside much of the 2010’s output. People will tell you “Girls Of Wild Strawberries” was the hit and since I’m not inclined to look up old CMJ charts (wasn’t very inclined in 2004, either) we can either presume that’s accurate or simply skip ahead to “Closets Of Henry”, which somehow didn’t make the greatest hits, ‘Human Amusements At Hourly Rates’ (sticklers for detail will claim that’s because the comp. came out in 2003, but just to put the subject to bed, let’s just say it was record company negligence).

After this, it would be another 8 years for a Guided By Voices studio album (and there were three of ‘em in 2012, OF COURSE).”

Over their nearly three decade-long career, Spoon have continually refined their legacy within indie rock. They have maintained an instantly recognizable sound, yet the stylistic distance between A Series of Sneaks and Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and Hot Thoughts is significant. This summer, in a move befitting their elder statesmen status, they’ll sum up their output so far with a greatest hits album called Everything Hits At Once.
The collection includes 12 classic Spoon singles — though none from before 2001’s Girls Can Tell — plus one new song, “No Bullets Spent,” which they’re sharing today. The band’s signature rhythmic energy and instrumental isolation are very much present on the new track. Soaring yet jutting guitar riffs are yet another familiar characteristic, making this song sound like a true celebration of their lengthy career. Britt Daniel’s abstractly elliptical lyrics loosely reference class and societal struggles, with the chorus carping, “No one to blame and no bullets spent/ All we need now’s an accident.”
In a bio accompanying Everything Hits At Once, Daniel explains: “The idea of doing a best-of came to us a couple times. First I wasn’t sure how I felt about it but at some point I remembered that when I got my first Cure record it was Standing On A Beach. When I got my first New Order record, it was Substance. That was how I met those bands, and I moved backwards from there but I still listen to those comps. I love a greatest hits LP when it’s done well. It can be a thing unto itself.”

Following hot on the heels of 2018’s Sparkle Hard comes Groove Denied, the rejected album Stephen has been telling everyone about.

Groove Denied was written in Berlin and Oregon between Malkmus’ soundtrack to the Netflix series Flaked and Sparkle Hard. It finds Stephen in a playful, exploratory mode – recorded by himself in Oregon; Malkmus plays bass, organ, drum machines, a Roland 2080 and a Memorymoog alongside other instruments interspersed with loops and vocal effects.

His first album as a solo artist since 2001, Groove Denied is a fine companion to Sparkle Hard, echoing the experimentation (Auto-Tune, genre-dabbling)

Initially sold as a bonus item alongside the 2009 release of the band’s final album, ‘The Eternal’, the live recording will now be available on streaming services and as a stand-alone physical package for the first time ever. Culled from their show at Battery Park’s River To River Festival (and broadcast live on WFMU), the setlist spans the band’s 30-year career.

Recorded during time spent in upstate New York with Dave Fridmann, the five songs that make up A Fine Mess gradually emerged as a body of work with a narrative and flow unto itself. The title track, and BBC 6 Music-playlisted single ‘Fine Mess’, then received further production from Kaines & Tom A.D. and mixing from Claudius Mittendorfer, who had first worked with Interpol as engineer on Our Love To Admire. The resulting set is a living, breathing postcard from the band to their fans as they tour the world throughout 2019, and a linear continuation of the visceral and contagious energy set loose with Marauder.

Echoing its title, the artwork for A Fine Mess is illustrated by a series of lost images, recovered from an abandoned police station in Detroit, MI. In a crumbling evidence room – amongst the rubble – an undeveloped roll of film, dated “1-20-96”, featured latent images of a breaking and entering scene, the rooms in chaos.

From the beguiling refrain of the title track, to the soulful topsy-turvy of ‘No Big Deal’, cathartic chorus of long sought-after live favourite ‘Real Life’, anthemic swell of ‘The Weekend’, and angular shades of ‘Thrones’, A Fine Mess is a bracing and distinct entry in Interpol’s oeuvre.

For over a decade, Steve Gunn has been one of American music’s most pivotal figures — conjuring immersive and psychedelic sonic landscapes both live and on record, releasing revered solo albums ranking high on in-the-know end of year lists, alongside exploratory collaborations with artists as diverse as Mike Cooper, Kurt Vile, and Michael Chapman (whose most recent studio album he produced). Gunn is known for telling other people’s stories, but on his breakthrough fourth album, The Unseen In Between, he explores his own emotional landscapes with his most complex, fully realized songs to date. The lyrics evoke voyages, tempests (actual and emotional), and a rich cast of characters met along the way — the work of an artist finding a place of calm in the midst of a storm. Produced by frequent collaborator James Elkington and engineered by Daniel Schlett, the immaculately recorded Unseen forces a reassessment of Gunn’s standing in the pantheon of the era’s great songwriters.

Getting to The Unseen In Between itself was not easy for Gunn. In the summer of 2016, Gunn released Eyes On The Lines, his winning and elliptical debut for Matador. It should have been a triumphant moment, but exactly two weeks later, Gunn’s father and namesake died following a two-year struggle with cancer. During his sickness, he and his son had connected as never before, listening to one another’s experiences and understanding one another’s perspectives; they became not father and son but real friends.

Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus formed Boygenius after booking a tour together, but the trio had subconsciously been in the works for longer than that. Through a series of tours and performances together, and chance encounters that led to friendships – including Bridgers’ and Dacus’ first in-person meeting backstage at a Philadelphia festival, greenroom hangouts that felt instantly comfortable and compatible, a couple of long email chains and even a secret handshake between Baker and Dacus – the lyrically and musically arresting singer-songwriters and kindred spirits got to know each other on their own terms.

Kurt Vile is back with his first record in three years, the eclectic and electrifying Bottle It In, which he recorded at various studios around America over two very busy years, during sessions that usually punctuated the ends of long tours or family road trips. Every song, whether it’s a concise and catchy pop composition or a sprawling guitar epic, becomes a journey unto itself, taking unexpected detours, circuitous melodic avenues, or open-highway solos. If Vile has become something of a rock guitar god—a mantle he would dismiss out of humility but also out of a desire to keep getting better, to continue absorbing new music, new sounds, new ideas—it’s due to his precise, witty playing style, which turns every riff and rhythm into points on a map and takes the scenic route from one to the next.
Using past albums as points of departure, Bottle It In heads off in new directions, pushing at the edges of the map into unexplored territory: Here be monster jams. These songs show an artist who is still evolving and growing: a songwriter who, like his hero John Prine, can make you laugh and break your heart, often in the same line, as well as a vocalist who essentially rewrites those songs whenever he sings them in his wise, laconic jive-talkin’ drawl. He revels in the minutiae of the music— not simply incorporating new instruments but emphasizing how they interact with his guitar and voice, how the glockenspiel evokes cirrocumulus clouds on “Hysteria,” how Kim Gordon’s “acoustic guitar distortion” (her term) engulfs everything at the end of “Mutinies,” how the banjo curls around his guitar lines and backing vocals from Lucius to lend a high-lonesome aura to “Come Again.”

The brilliant Hoboken trio of Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley and James McNew explore the sunny landscapes of summer, in every imaginable mode of music. From the gorgeous “Little Eyes” to the ten-minute jam “Let’s Be Still”, this may be Yo La Tengo’s most ambitious album to date.

For the first time since 2007’s Our Love to Admire, Interpol have opened themselves up to the input of a producer. For two-week spells between December of 2017 to April of 2018, they travelled to upstate New York to work with Dave Fridmann – famed for recording with Mercury Rev, Flaming Lips, MGMT, Spoon, Mogwai, and countless more. In the run up to writing and recording, Sam found himself immersed in soul drummers such as Al Jackson Jr (Otis Redding’s drummer) and 80’s funk producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. “How can I make shit swing?” was the question Sam repeatedly asked himself, and the answer is in the striding gallop of opener If You Really Love Nothing, the embellished skip ‘n’ bounce of Stay in Touch and the R&B swagger of closer It Probably Matters. Interpol have always been world-beaters at creating a feeling, but Marauder is where the feel is just as crucial. Paul may have stepped out of the shadows as a bassist, but he’s stepping into an even brighter light as a songwriter. During Interpol’s previous albums, the singer largely kept himself out of his own work, preferring to fill his lyrics with detached thoughts, characters, and observations, often phrased in abstract. But more than 20 years on since forming at NYU, the frontman is finally allowing himself to play a role in his own stories. “This record is where I feel touching on real things that have happened to me are exciting and evocative to write about,” he explains. “I think in the past, I always felt autobiography was too small a thing for me to reference. I feel like now, I’m able to romanticize parts of my own life.”

Body/Head is the duo of Kim Gordon and Bill Nace. Creative alchemy doesn’t just happen in the studio or in the practice space; so much of it is the product of solo time with one’s instrument, learning how body and wood and electronics fuse, and of subconscious processes as one lives one’s daily life picking up the ambient noise of the world outside, listening to others’ work, talking through ideas with friends. For Kim and Bill, time together these days is limited to live performances and recording, so they’ve got to bring all their magic to every encounter. Lucky for us, these are two experimental sorcerers of significant renown. Their debut album together as Body/Head, Coming Apart, from 2013, was more of a rock record—heavy, emotional, cathartic, spellwork in shades of black and grey. The Switch is their second studio full-length, and it finds the duo working with a more subtle palette, refining their ideas and identity. Some of it was sketched out live (if you’ve not had the fortune of seeing them in that natural environment yet, see 2016’s improvisational document No Waves), but much of it happened purely in the moment. Working in the same studio and with the same producer as Coming Apart, here Body/Head stretch out, making spacious pieces that build shivering drones, dissonant interplay, Gordon’s manipulated vocals, and scraping, haunting textures into something that feels both delicate and dangerous. Less discrete songs than one composition broken up into thematic movements, a slow-moving narrative that requires as much attention and care from the listener as it did from everyone involved in its creation, it is a record that sticks around after it’s done playing. This is Nace’s favorite of Gordon’s guitar work; she’s truly come into her own as a guitarist, having built up her confidence through solo shows. The way the duo work together, you’d never know they spend so much time apart; on The Switch, their vision and focus feel truly unified. If Coming Apart was dark magic, The Switch works with light, though it never forgets that these approaches are two sides of the same coin, and that binaries—black/white, near/far, emotion/analysis, Body/Head are made to be broken open, and that the truth of things is in the energy between.

Snail Mail’s full-length debut album, Lush is released on Matador Records. It’s a debut for the record books — a refreshing marvel of songwriting and technical composition, that’s both cohesive and explosive — Her voice rises and falls with electricity throughout, spinning with bold excitement and new beginnings at every turn. Lush feels at times like an emotional rollercoaster, only fitting for Jordan’s explosive, dynamic personality. Growing up in Baltimore suburb Ellicot City, Jordan began her classical guitar training at age five, and a decade later wrote her first audacious songs as Snail Mail. Around that time, Jordan started frequenting local shows in Baltimore, where she formed close friendships within the local scene, the impetus for her to form a band. By the time she was sixteen, she had already released her debut EP, Habit, on local punk label Sister Polygon Records. For fans of Waxahatchee, Alvvays and Veronica Falls.

2018 marks the 25th anniversary of Liz Phair’s landmark Exile in Guyville album. Matador Records reissue the album on vinyl and CD. Re-mastered by Emily Lazar at The Lodge, the album is set for a remembrance worthy of its greatness. Originally released in 1993, Exile In Guyville is a seminal album and a feminist landmark. Its legendary status has only grown over the years. It’s continually included in countless lists…Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest albums of all time and 100 best albums of the 90s, Pitchfork’s Top 100 albums of the 90s, etc. Numerous essays and think pieces have been written about it and the number of accolades piled on is endless. Since the release of Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair has continued to defy expectation and break barriers. She has released five albums, and is currently working on a new one with Ryan Adams. She has also composed music for television shows and received awards for that work.

Copenhagen’s Iceage release their fourth album, Beyondless via Matador Records. Beyondlessradiates joy. It’s an album that shows Iceage finally catching up with their ambition, all the while retaining the rich character of the band’s brash beginnings. It’s important to pay attention to the journey, from New Brigade (2011), a juvenile delinquent take on post-punk, full of cold, distant condemnation, and onto the ecstasy of You’re Nothing (2013), shedding the more aggressive hardcore influence and dragging in more light, a tendency followed on Plowing Into The Field Of Love (2014). Throughout their career, the band’s charm has rested in their running ahead of themselves with blind confidence; on Beyondless, they are treading with a disarming assurance, but no loss of charm. The album was produced by the band with Nis Bysted, and recorded all-analog by Mattias Glavå at Kungsten Studios in Göteborg, Sweden, and mixed by Randall Dunn at Avast Studios in Seattle. The album was played entirely by Iceage with additional performances by Nils Gröndhal (violin), horns by Kasper Tranberg (trumpet), Lars Greve (saxophones) and Morten Jessen (trombone). Also Pain Killer features Sky Ferreira (the first guest vocalist to ever be featured on an Iceage song).